[CentOS-virt] Can I use direct attached storage as a shared filesystem in Xen

Christopher G. Stach II cgs at ldsys.net
Tue Feb 9 06:28:34 UTC 2010


----- "Adam Adamou" <adam0x54 at gmail.com> wrote:

> either nfs or ocfs2. nfs is the easiest route. ocfs2 will give you a
> clustered filesystem.

Except NFS doesn't follow normal filesystem semantics and you can end up with corrupt data without knowing it, and it, along with CIFS, will give you a free shitload of network overhead to go along with your possibly corrupt data. OCFS2 or GFS are the only practical choices if you want it to behave like a typical filesystem and not have to worry about catering to it or rewriting software and/or reeducating developers, and OCFS2 is extremely easy to set up.

The original question didn't specify much about the requirements, though. A single shared filesystem? Read-write or read-only? No filesystem at all? Without that information, I would at first recommend not sharing. It can be a lot of trouble, it's usually not required, and it severely complicates life when things fail.

Well, there is always XenFS... :/

-- 
Christopher G. Stach II
http://ldsys.net/~cgs/


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